Friday, January 9, 2009

One of my favorite and most-used Mac applications is called Growl: it’s a utility that works with many different applications to give me notifications. I use it with many different applications, but primarily with three: Google Notifier for Gmail, Adium for messaging, and Twitterrific for Twitter. What this means is that when someone contacts me by email, chat, or Twitter, I learn about it in exactly the same way, via Growl.

Which makes me wonder: why should I use three different applications to communicate with people, when in communicating I’m doing exactly the same thing: typing? Now, I’m not saying that email, chat, and Twitter shouldn't be different services — they should. They all give me different levels of control over who contacts me and how often I am contacted. That’s valuable. But once I’ve set that up, I don’t see why I should use three different applications to reply to messages. Shouldn't someone come up with a really cool application that combines all of these media into a single window? — with visual cues to distinguish one from another, of course, but still: One Communications App to Rule Them All.

Now Gmail is two-thirds of the way there, since it incorporates chat, and saves chats in your All Mail folder if you want. But it’s not a very elegant implementation, and Twitter is left out of the picture. I’d love to see a beautifully designed Mac app that brings it all together in one visually striking presentation.

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Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what's fun?